Tag: crime

$40 billion worth of crypto crime enabled by stablecoins since 2022

Stablecoins, cryptocurrencies pegged to a stable value like the US dollar, were created with the promise of bringing the frictionless, border-crossing fluidity of bitcoin to a form of digital money with far less volatility. That combination has proved to be wildly popular, rocketing the total value of stablecoin transactions since 2022 past even that of Bitcoin itself.

It turns out, however, that as stablecoins have become popular among legitimate users over the past two years, they were even more popular among a different kind of user: those exploiting them for billions of dollars of international sanctions evasion and scams.

As part of its annual crime report, cryptocurrency-tracing firm Chainalysis today released new numbers on the disproportionate use of stablecoins for both of those massive categories of illicit crypto transactions over the last year. By analyzing blockchains, Chainalysis determined that stablecoins were used in fully 70 percent of crypto scam transactions in 2023, 83 percent of crypto payments to sanctioned countries like Iran and Russia, and 84 percent of crypto payments to specifically sanctioned individuals and companies. Those numbers far outstrip stablecoins’ growing overall use—including for legitimate purposes—which accounted for 59 percent of all cryptocurrency transaction volume in 2023.

In total, Chainalysis measured $40 billion in illicit stablecoin transactions in 2022 and 2023 combined. The largest single category of that stablecoin-enabled crime was sanctions evasion. In fact, across all cryptocurrencies, sanctions evasion accounted for more than half of the $24.2 billion in criminal transactions Chainalysis observed in 2023, with stablecoins representing the vast majority of those transactions.

The attraction of stablecoins for both sanctioned people and countries, argues Andrew Fierman, Chainalysis’ head of sanctions strategy, is that it allows targets of sanctions to circumvent any attempt to deny them a stable currency like the US dollar. “Whether it’s an individual located in Iran or a bad guy trying to launder money—either way, there’s a benefit to the stability of the US dollar that people are looking to obtain,” Fierman says. “If you’re in a jurisdiction where you don’t have access to the US dollar due to sanctions, stablecoins become an interesting play.”

As examples, Fierman points to Nobitex, the largest cryptocurrency exchange operating in the sanctioned country of Iran, as well as Garantex, a notorious exchange based in Russia that has been specifically sanctioned for its widespread criminal use. Stablecoin usage on Nobitex outstrips bitcoin by a 9:1 ratio, and on Garantex by a 5:1 ratio, Chainalysis found. That’s a stark difference from the roughly 1:1 ratio between stablecoins and bitcoins on a few nonsanctioned mainstream exchanges that Chainalysis checked for comparison.

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LA Innocence Project took wife-killer Scott Peterson’s case because of key evidence including blood spatter that might have exonerated him but was withheld from trial and other suspects ‘who were were overlooked’

The Los Angeles Innocence Project decided to take Scott Peterson’s case with a view to revisiting previously ‘withheld’ evidence that may exonerate him, court records reveal. 

The organization – which is separate from the more acclaimed Innocence Project – was contacted by Peterson’s team in March last year. 

Its attorneys have not publicly discussed the case nor vouched for Peterson’s absolute innocence.

A spokesman today told DailyMail.com: ‘The Los Angeles Innocence Project (LAIP) represents Scott Peterson and is investigating his claim of actual innocence. 

‘We have no further comment at this time.’ 

Paperwork submitted to the Superior Court of California in San Mateo however highlights why they think he may have a shot at clearing his name. 

Lawyers point to ‘blood spatter’ in the home where Peterson is accused of murdering his pregnant wife Laci, but insist it does not belong to him. 

They also say no other suspects were considered. 

Laci was 27-years-old and eight months pregnant when she disappeared on Christmas Eve, 2002. 

Peterson led the search for his wife but was arrested months later when her body later washed up in the San Francisco shoreline in 2003.

He has always claimed that she was killed by a panicked burglar after catching them ransacking the couple’s home. 

A jury however convicted him of the killing, deciding he was motivated by an affair he was having at the time with Amber Frey, a 20-year-old massage therapist. 

Peterson was sentenced to death, but the decision was overturned in 2020 by the California Supreme Court, citing potential juror bias that prosecutors failed to account for. 

In December 2022, Peterson’s request for a new trial was rejected. 

Now, the L.A. Innocence Project is spearheading his case.  

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Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping Case: Bombshell New Theory Proposes Aviator Staged Abduction After Medical Experiments Killed His Son

Anew theory gaining ground about the notorious 1930s Lindbergh kidnapping suggests aviator Charles Lindbergh volunteered his child for medical research and staged the crime to cover up the baby’s death.

The true crime author and retired judge passionately promoting this idea says an innocent man was executed for the crime, Knewz.com has learned.

The high-profile New Jersey kidnapping-turned-murder has been a closed case since Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German native who lived in New York illegally, was convicted of the crime. Hauptmann maintained his innocence until the day he was sent to the electric chair.

Now, nearly a century later, “respected Bay Area historians are proposing a new, macabre theory about the case,” according to a Tuesday, January 2 report by The San Francisco Chronicle.

“A lot of leads weren’t followed, about a dozen state witnesses likely committed perjury, and the prosecution had 90,000 pages of investigation they didn’t let Hauptmann or his defense see,” retired judge and award-winning true crime author and filmmaker Lise Pearlman told The Chronicle. “The wrong man was executed, and my hope is that Hauptmann will be posthumously exonerated. And I am certainly not the only one who wants that.”

Pearlman believes Lindbergh was responsible for staging the kidnapping, and is pushing for New Jersey officials to release evidence from the case’s archives that may confirm these suspicions.

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CRIME SCENE DNA DIDN’T MATCH MARCELLUS WILLIAMS. MISSOURI MAY FAST-TRACK HIS EXECUTION ANYWAY.

FELICIA ANNE GAYLE PICUS was found dead in her home, the victim of a vicious murder that devastated her family and rattled her neighbors in the gated community of University City, Missouri, just outside St. Louis. Police suspected a burglary gone wrong. The scene was replete with forensic evidence: There were bloody footprints and fingerprints, and the murder weapon — a kitchen knife used to stab Picus — was left lodged in her neck.

That detail caught the medical examiner’s attention. Weeks earlier, another woman had been stabbed to death just a couple of miles away, and the weapon was left in the victim’s body. Days after Picus’s murder, the University City police chief told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that investigators had identified a “prime suspect,” someone they said had been spotted in the area “in recent weeks,” whom they believed had killed before.

But whatever became of that lead is unclear. After Picus’s family posted a $10,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of her killer, a jailhouse informant named Henry Cole came forward with a story about how his former cellmate, Marcellus Williams, had confessed to murdering Picus. Soon, police secured a second informant: Laura Asaro, Williams’s former girlfriend, also told the cops that Williams was responsible for the killing. There were reasons to be wary of their stories. Both informants were facing prison time for unrelated crimes and stood to benefit. Many of the details they offered shifted over the course of questioning, while others did not match the crime. Nonetheless, Williams was charged with Picus’s murder, convicted, and sentenced to death.

Questions about the investigation and Williams’s guilt have only mounted in the years since the August 1998 crime. DNA testing on the murder weapon done years after his conviction revealed a partial male profile that could not have come from Williams. On the eve of Williams’s scheduled execution in 2017, then-Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens intervened. He issued an executive order that triggered a rarely used provision of Missouri law, empaneling a board to review the evidence, including DNA, that jurors never heard about at trial.

While that review was ongoing for most of the last six years, the board never submitted a final report or recommendation to the governor, as the law requires. Instead, last June, Gov. Mike Parson announced that he was rescinding his predecessor’s order, effectively dissolving the panel that had been reinvestigating the case.

The question now is whether Missouri law allows the governor to simply disappear an ongoing investigation. Because the law has so rarely been used, its contours have never been fully litigated, prompting the Midwest Innocence Project, which represents Williams, to file a civil lawsuit seeking to invalidate Parson’s order. The state’s attorney general balked, arguing that Williams was trying to usurp the governor’s independent clemency powers. The AG has asked the Missouri Supreme Court to toss the lawsuit — and clear the way for Williams’s execution.

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FBI Defies Court Order – Refuses to Turn Over Seth Rich Evidence to Attorney

Attorney Ty Clevenger is the bulldog attorney who has been after the DOJ and FBI for years to get to the bottom of the Seth Rich murder.

Clevenger also investigated who supplied the DNC and Podesta emails to the DNC during the 2016 election cycle This was always the key to the Trump-Russia collusion nightmare.  No proof was ever offered up by the fake news legacy media, Democrats, or the intelligence community on this scandal. If Russia did not supply the DNC emails to WikiLeaks then this was more proof that the DOJ’s Russia collusion story was a complete lie used to fool the American public.

After years of denying they had anything related to Seth Rich, the FBI and DOJ were caught lying over and over again.  In September 2023, a judge finally demanded the FBI and DOJ provide all they had regarding Seth Rich to Attorney Clevenger. The FBI responded requesting another 66 years before releasing the information. They wanted it moved out like the JFK assassination reports.

Then in late November, a Federal Judge ruled the FBI must hand over evidence regarding former DNC employee Seth Rich’s murder to Ty Clevenger.

This is big news since one year earlier the FBI was attempting to bury the information on Seth Rich for 66 years.

No media outlet has covered the Seth Rich story as extensively as The Gateway Pundit.

Judge Amos L. Mazzant ruled the FBI must hand over Rich’s personal laptop, work laptop, a DVD, and thumb drive within 14 days.

It’s now been over 40 days since this ruling came down and the lawless Chris Wray FBI has defied the court order.

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‘It was creepy’: Woman found in prone position with no head or thumbs and blood drained from entire body is identified

Nearly 13 years after cops found a woman without her head or thumbs and with her blood drained from her body, they now know her name.

The Kern County Sheriff’s Office last week said it identified the woman found dead in a grape vineyard in Arvin, California, on March 29, 2011, as 64-year-old Ada Beth Kaplan. The scene that day in Arvin, which is about 30 miles south of Bakersfield, was brutal. In addition to having her head and thumbs chopped off, the woman now known as Kaplan also was nude and placed in a prone position that investigators considered sexual.

Detectives believe she was killed elsewhere and carefully placed in the vineyard. Coroners categorized the death as a homicide but could not determine the cause of death.

Ray Pruitt, then an investigator with Kern County Sheriff’s Department, described the scene as “surreal” in a 2018 interview with NBC affiliate KGET.

“I remember looking at the detectives and the sergeant on scene and the coroner investigator who had arrived on the scene and we were all kind of speechless,” Pruitt said. “We were all just looking at each other trying to get our minds around what we were looking at.”

Pruitt said the murder was one “that you come across maybe once in an entire career, maybe never.”

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TSA director arrested by US Customs and Border Protection

An official with the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has been arrested on an outstanding warrant, according to local reports.

TSA Assistant Federal Security Director Maxine McManaman was arrested in Atlanta by U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Dec. 28. 

McManaman had a warrant for her arrest posted by the St. Lucie County (Florida) Sheriff’s Office, which claimed she and an alleged accomplice named Delroy Chambers Sr. exploited a relative suffering from dementia by falsifying documents in their name, according to Port St. Lucie Police.

The Florida authorities allege that the duo forged signatures on a quitclaim deed transferring ownership of a property in the relative’s name over to themselves.

The relative whose property was transferred to McManaman and Chambers allegedly could not have signed the quitclaim deed, because the individual was found to have been in Atlanta on the date listed, according to police. 

Chambers was previously arrested on Dec. 20 in Port St. Lucie, charged with two counts of exploitation of an elderly or disabled adult, simple neglect and two counts of forgery. He eventually bonded out of jail. 

McManaman is facing a third-degree felony charge of forgery.

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Maine’s Bad Prostitution Law Could Be Coming Soon to Your State

In 2023, Maine became the first U.S. state to partially decriminalize prostitution. It’s unlikely to be the last. And sex-worker rights activists are concerned.

By criminalizing prostitution customers but not sex workers, Maine’s law may seem like a step in the right direction. But it threatens to derail momentum for full decriminalization, while recreating many of full prohibition’s harms.

It also represents a paternalistic philosophical premise: that sex workers are all victims and their consent to sexual activity is—like a minor’s—irrelevant. And this premise is used to justify all sorts of bad programs and policies, including drastically ramping up penalties for people who pay for sex.

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Oregon man who dismembered handymen, fed them to pigs, serving 50-year sentence in women’s prison after identifying as trans

A trans-identified male convicted of murdering and dismembering two handymen and then feeding them to his pigs has been serving his 50-year sentence in a women’s correctional facility in Oregon.

Susan Monica, born Steven Buchanan, was sentenced to serve at least 50 years in prison in 2015 after being found guilty of murder and abusing the corpses of two handymen, 59-year-old Stephen Delicino in 2012 and 56-year-old Robert Haney in 2013, according to an Oregon Live report from that time.

According to the Willamette Week, Monica is serving the sentence out at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, located around 16 miles south of Portland, Ore. The facility accommodates all State of Oregon female adults in custody.

The Oregon Department of Corrections lists Monica under the female name, and he is described as being “female” in official documents, according to the Daily Mail.

Monica, who previously served in the Vietnam war and is a US Navy veteran, bought the 20-acre farm in Oregon where the gruesome murders took place in 1991.

Delicino was hired by Monica to work on the farm in 2012. There was allegedly a confrontation between the two after the handyman was said to have been found with Monica’s gun.

Monica claimed that during the altercation, the gun misfired and hit Delicino in the back of the head, killing him. Monica also claimed that he shot Delicino in self defense, with senior assistant deputy district attorney Allan Smith telling the jury in closing arguments that Monica’s changing stories never matched the forensic evidence.

Monica told investigators that Delicino was eaten by his pigs before being buried on the farm.

Just one year later, Monica hired Haney to work as a handyman on the farm. The man’s children became worried when they hadn’t heard from their father in over two months and filed a missing persons report with the Jackson County Sheriff’s Office.

Haney’s son, Jesse, visited Monica’s farm on January 1, 2014 to ask for his father’s items back and ask where he was.

“We hadn’t seen or heard from my dad for two months. We just all started to panic,” Jesse said in a documentary about the murders.

“His leather jacket was there. His dog was still running around and all his tools were there… It made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up,” Jesse said.

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Retired NYPD captain shoots man in leg during New Year’s Eve road rage feud: sources

A recently retired NYPD captain shot another man in the leg during a road rage feud in Brooklyn on New Year’s Eve, police sources said. 

The retiree, who was driving a Toyota Corolla, clashed with a 22-year-old man behind the wheel of a Mercedes-Benz on Coney Island Avenue near Brighton Beach Avenue around 2:15 p.m., the sources said. 

Both drivers got out of their vehicles and started to argue, according to the sources. 

The confrontation took a violent turn when the former cop fired off a gun, hitting the other motorist in the left leg, the sources said. 

The wounded man was taken to NYU Langone Hospital—Brooklyn, where he was listed in stable condition, police said. 

The retired captain was taken to the same hospital, and it remained unclear Monday whether he would face charges. 

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